Companies like Square or PayPal that want to get involved in mobile payments

The early winners and losers should tell us a lot about who currently holds the most power in the mobile industry: Consumers, handset companies, OS companies, carriers, software makers, integrators, or a combination.

For example, will a Verizon Droid phone by Motorola support Verizon's payments system by default, Google's, Motorola's, a different service, a combination, all, or none?

More important: Which service, if any, will people actually use?

Over the next couple of years, we'll start to see 1) if consumers actually care about mobile payments, 2) which payments services and models they end up choosing, and 3) if that's because they're the best or because they're the ones with the strongest backers.

A lot of money and a lot of data are at stake, and everybody wants it. So it's going to be a very interesting battle to watch.